Vintage 1980s Hello Kitty Cotton Napkin Handkerchief 🎀 Yellow - Sanrio Japan NOS

What Does Hello Kitty Read When the News Is Bad? 🎀 Vintage 1980s Sanrio Cotton Napkin Handkerchief, Yellow, NOS

Size: 11 1/4"

"Bad news," says the headline, and Hello Kitty squeezes her eyes shut and reads it anyway. That little joke sits in one corner of this 1980s cotton handkerchief, with three happier scenes in the others: an ice cream sundae, a pile of presents and a picture on an easel. It is a pocket-sized piece of Hello Kitty's first great decade, printed on the one thing Japanese schoolchildren are still asked to bring to class every day.

Vintage 1980s Hello Kitty cotton napkin handkerchief with a yellow border, new old stock. Size: 11 1/4" square.

What Is Printed on It

A square of fine, light cotton with a sunny yellow border and a narrow stitched edge. Hello Kitty appears four times, one scene set at an angle in each corner and facing outward, so that folded into quarters any corner can sit on top and show a complete picture. Every scene has HELLO KITTY in rounded yellow letters, with a short English caption underneath in its own color.

• Ice cream, captioned in pink: Kitty in pink with a yellow bow, holding a cone with a red scoop, a little pink bird on one side and a pink sundae in a red footed dish, a cherry on top, on the other.
• Presents, captioned in orange: Kitty hugging an orange gift tied with a green ribbon, a pink box with a yellow bow beside her and a pink envelope lettered MINNY, sealed with a yellow heart.
• Drawing, captioned in green: Kitty in green with a crayon in her paw, a pink drawing board propped on a yellow easel and red and orange crayons standing by.
• Bad news, captioned in red: Kitty with her eyes closed behind a pink paper headlined "bad news" in multicolored letters, a milk bottle marked M with a pink straw on her right and a red jar marked with a yellow fish on her left.

The design is printed on one side. On the back the four scenes show faintly through the thin cotton, in reverse.

Condition

New old stock. Besides the one opened for photos, these napkins were bundled in original packaging and stored away for decades. The colors are bright and the cotton is clean.

Who Hello Kitty Is

Hello Kitty was designed in 1974 by Yuko Shimizu for Sanrio. Shimizu took the name from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, where Alice plays with a cat she calls Kitty. The character's first product was a small vinyl coin purse sold in Japan in 1975, and the next year Hello Kitty reached America through a Sanrio store in San Jose, California. Setsuko Yonekubo took over as lead designer in 1976, and in 1980 Yuko Yamaguchi became lead designer and stayed in charge from then on, so a 1980s hanky like this one comes from the Yamaguchi years.

Sanrio gives her a full biography. Her name is Kitty White and her birthday is November 1. She was born in the suburbs of London, England, she is five apples tall and weighs three apples, and she has an identical twin sister, Mimmy, who wears a yellow bow on her right ear. On this handkerchief Kitty's own bow is printed yellow too.

She Is Not a Cat

In 2014 the University of Hawaii anthropologist Christine Yano, author of Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty's Trek Across the Pacific, was curating a Hello Kitty exhibition for the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Her script called the character "Sanrio's cat," and the company corrected her: Hello Kitty is a little girl. She is never shown on all fours, she walks and sits like a two-legged creature, and she keeps a pet cat of her own named Charmmy Kitty. The correction made headlines around the world.

Sanrio, From Silk to Sandals

Shintaro Tsuji founded the company on August 10, 1960, as the Yamanashi Silk Company, with one million yen in capital. By 1962 he was selling rubber sandals painted with flowers and saw that a cute design made them sell far better, so he began hiring artists to draw characters for his goods. The business became Sanrio in 1973. Tsuji explained that the name comes from reading the characters of Yamanashi another way, as "Sanri," with an "o" added for the happy sound people make. Sanrio first paid to license outside characters such as Snoopy, then built its own design team to avoid the royalties; Coro Chan came out of it in 1973 and Hello Kitty in 1974. Tsuji ran the company for sixty years, stepping down in June 2020 and handing it to his grandson Tomokuni Tsuji, who at 31 became the youngest chief executive of a listed company in Japan.

Why a Handkerchief

In Japan a handkerchief is everyday equipment. Many public restrooms have no paper towels or hand dryers, so people carry a cloth to dry their hands, and public schools ask children to bring a handkerchief or small towel every day. It is for clean hands, summer sweat and the odd tear, never for blowing your nose. A character hanky is the kind of small, useful present Sanrio's whole business was built around.

The Legend of the Square Handkerchief

Japan even keeps a Handkerchief Day. The Japan Handkerchief Federation set it in 1983 on November 3, the Culture Day holiday, one day after Marie Antoinette's birthday, because of a legend about the queen. The story goes that she grew tired of handkerchiefs cut in every shape and size, and in 1785 Louis XVI obliged her with a decree that "the length of handkerchiefs shall equal their width throughout my entire kingdom." Whatever the truth of it, the handkerchief has been square ever since, and at 11 1/4" on every side this one keeps the queen's rule.

Cute Becomes a Culture

Hello Kitty arrived just as Japan fell in love with cuteness. In the 1970s Japanese teenage girls began writing in a large, rounded, childlike hand, drawn with mechanical pencils and decorated with hearts, stars, little faces and English letters. It went by names like marui ji, "round writing," and koneko ji, "kitten writing," and it caused enough of a stir that many schools banned it. The researcher Kazuma Yamane studied what he called "Anomalous Female Teenage Handwriting" from 1984 to 1986, and the scholar Sharon Kinsella concluded that the girls had invented the style themselves as an underground trend, not copied it from comics. By the 1980s magazines, comics and product packaging had all taken it up. Hello Kitty was an immediate success in that world and became the model for the whole kawaii merchandise industry, and the playful English captions on this hanky, Ice cream, Presents, Drawing and Bad news, speak exactly that language.

What Came After

In 1983 Hello Kitty was named UNICEF's children's ambassador to the United States. In 2008 Japan made her its ambassador of tourism. By 2013 she was doing about $8 billion at retail, and the first Hello Kitty Con, held in Los Angeles in 2014, drew more than 25,000 visitors. Rock and pop took her up as well: the Hello Kitty Stratocaster guitar has been played by Krist Novoselic, Courtney Love, Dave Navarro and Lisa Loeb, and Avril Lavigne released a song called "Hello Kitty" in 2013. She turned 50 in 2024. Warner Bros. Pictures Animation and New Line Cinema have dated a Hello Kitty feature film for July 21, 2028, directed by Leo Matsuda; its producer, Beau Flynn, spent nearly a decade winning over Shintaro Tsuji, and it is the first time Sanrio has granted film rights to its most famous character.

🎀 About these

The supply is finite - once these last unused 1980s Sanrio handkerchiefs are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.